Designing a 3D Printed Board Game

This was a project I worked on with a robotics mentor who's into board games. I designed and 3D printed the pieces but never got around to fully playtesting the game and finalizing the rulebook. I learned the basics of gear design and improved my 3D printing skills during this project. In total, I used almost 2 rolls of PLA filament to print all the pieces.

Experimental larger central tower I was playtesting

The game is fairly simple, it's a territory control game where you try to take over your opponent's kingdoms. The catch is that the board is always changing, every turn the gears rotate and the connections between towers change and any attack might get blocked off. 

Rotating gear towers

I learned how to properly tune 3D printer retraction settings to make the larger towers

I used Autodesk Inventor to model the pieces and used the built-in spline generator to make the gear teeth. I learned a lot about board game design when doing this project; initially, I underestimated the hundreds of hours of playtesting that go into designing most board games. Editable versions of all the different types of towers are available here.